Singapore

Neural solvers have demonstrated remarkable success in combinatorial optimization, often surpassing traditional heuristics in speed, solution quality, and generalization. However, their efficacy deteriorates significantly when confronted with complex constraints that cannot be effectively managed through simple masking mechanisms. To address this limitation, we introduce Universal Constrained Preference Optimization (UCPO), a novel plug-and-play framework that seamlessly integrates preference learning into existing neural solvers via a specially designed loss function, without requiring architectural modifications. UCPO embeds constraint satisfaction directly into a preference-based objective, eliminating the need for meticulous hyperparameter tuning. Leveraging a lightweight warm-start fine-tuning protocol, UCPO enables pre-trained models to consistently produce near-optimal, feasible solutions on challenging constraint-laden tasks, achieving exceptional performance with as little as 1\% of the original training budget.

AAAI 2026

UCPO: A Universal Constrained Combinatorial Optimization Method via Preference Optimization

preference optimization

neural combinatorial optimization

constraints

## Welcome!
"I am excited to welcome you to this year’s edition of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing! Importantly, it marks the 30th edition of EMNLP. With over 8,000 submissions, more than 3,000 accepted papers, and thousands of attendees, we have come a long way from that first
workshop, which had 14 accepted papers. As the field looks ahead, Suzhou is the fitting location for celebrating this milestone: rooted in a long literary tradition, yet modern and forward-looking, and home to a large share of the NLP community." 

*Message from the General Chair, Dirk Hovy*

EMNLP 2025

Celebrate 30 Years of EMNLP! 
EMNLP 2025 will be held in Suzhou, China from November 5th to November 9th, 2025.

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We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

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We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

Text-to-image (T2I) models have raised increasing safety concerns due to their capacity to generate NSFW and other banned objects. To mitigate these risks, safety filters and concept removal techniques have been introduced to block inappropriate prompts or erase sensitive concepts from the models. However, all the existing defense methods are not well prepared to handle diverse adversarial prompts. In this work, we introduce MacPrompt, a novel black-box and cross-lingual attack that reveals previously overlooked vulnerabilities in T2I safety mechanisms. Unlike existing attacks that rely on synonym substitution or prompt obfuscation, MacPrompt constructs macaronic adversarial prompts by performing cross-lingual character-level recombination of harmful terms, enabling fine-grained control over both semantics and appearance. By leveraging this design, MacPrompt crafts prompts with high semantic similarity to the original harmful inputs (up to 0.96) while bypassing major safety filters (up to 100\%). More critically, it achieves attack success rates as high as 92\% for sex-related content and 90\% for violence, effectively breaking even state-of-the-art concept removal defenses. These results underscore the pressing need to reassess the robustness of existing T2I safety mechanisms against linguistically diverse and fine-grained adversarial strategies.
\textbf{Warning: Content Warning: This paper includes sensitive examples (e.g., adult, violent, or illegal content). Unsafe images are masked but may still be disturbing.}

MacPrompt: Maraconic-Guided Jailbreak Against Text-to-Image Models

Structured data question answering (QA), including table QA, Knowledge Graph (KG) QA, and temporal KG QA, is a pivotal research area. Advances in large language models (LLMs) have driven significant progress in unified structural QA frameworks like TrustUQA. However, these frameworks face challenges when applied to small-scale LLMs since small-scale LLMs are prone to errors in generating structured queries.
To improve the structured data QA ability of small-scale LLMs, we propose a self-correction distillation (SCD) method. In SCD, an error prompt mechanism (EPM) is designed to detect errors and provide customized error messages during inference, and a two-stage distillation strategy is designed to transfer large-scale LLMs' query-generation and error-correction capabilities to small-scale LLM.
Experiments across 5 benchmarks with 3 structured data types demonstrate that our SCD achieves the best performance and superior generalization on small-scale LLM (8B) compared to other distillation methods, and closely approaches the performance of GPT4 on some datasets. Furthermore, large-scale LLMs equipped with EPM surpass the state-of-the-art results on most datasets.

Self-Correction Distillation for Structured Data Question Answering

Large Language Models (LLMs) with Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures are distinguished by their strong performance scaling with increasing parameters across a wide range of tasks, yet they also suffer from substantial computational and storage overheads. Notably, the performance gains of MoE models do not scale proportionally with the growth in expert parameters. While prior works attempt to reduce parameters via expert-level pruning, merging, or decomposition, they still suffer from challenges in both performance and computational efficiency. In this paper, we address these challenges by introducing **micro-expert** as a finer-grained compression unit that spans across matrices. We first establish a more fundamental perspective, viewing MoE layers as mixtures of micro-experts, and present **CAMERA**, a lightweight and training-free framework for identifying micro-expert redundancy. Our analysis uncovers significant variance in micro-expert contributions during decoding. Based on this insight, we further propose **CAMERA-P**, a structured micro-expert pruning framework, and **CAMERA-Q**, a mixed-precision quantization idea designed for micro-experts. Extensive experiments on nine downstream tasks show that **CAMERA-P** consistently outperforms strong baselines under pruning ratios ranging from 20% to 60%. Furthermore, **CAMERA-Q** achieves superior results under aggressive 2-bit quantization, surpassing existing matrix- and channel-level ideas. Notably, our method enables complete micro-expert analysis of Qwen2-57B-A14B in less than 5 minutes on a single NVIDIA A100-40GB GPU.

CAMERA: Multi-Matrix Joint Compression for MoE Models via Micro-Expert Redundancy Analysis

Intraoperative hypotension (IOH) poses significant surgical risks, but accurate prediction remains challenging due to patient-specific variability. While test-time adaptation (TTA) offers a promising approach for personalized prediction, the rarity of IOH events often leads to unreliable test-time training. To address this, we propose CSA-TTA, a novel cross-sample augmented test-time adaptation framework that enhances training by incorporating hypotension events from other individuals. Specifically, we first construct a cross-sample bank by segmenting historical data into hypotensive and non-hypotensive samples. Then, we introduce a coarse-to-fine retrieval strategy for building test-time training data: we initially apply K-Shape clustering to identify representative cluster centers and subsequently retrieve the top-K semantically similar samples based on the current patient signal. Additionally, we integrate both self-supervised masked reconstruction and retrospective sequence forecasting signals during training to enhance model adaptability to rapid and subtle intraoperative dynamics. We evaluate the proposed CSA-TTA on both the VitalDB dataset and a real-world in-hospital dataset by integrating it with state-of-the-art time series forecasting models, including TimesFM and UniTS. CSA-TTA consistently enhances performance across settings—for instance, on VitalDB, it improves Recall and F1 scores by +1.33% and +1.13%, respectively, under fine-tuning, and by +5.07% and +7.46% in zero-shot scenarios—demonstrating strong robustness and generalization.

Cross-Sample Augmented Test-Time Adaptation for Personalized Intraoperative Hypotension Prediction

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities in multi-step reasoning and problem-solving. Recent works introduce multi-agent reflection frameworks where multiple LLM agents critique and refine each other’s outputs using reinforcement learning (RL). However, these approaches often rely on single-shot responses and lack structural diversity in reasoning exploration. In this paper, we propose DRAFT-RL, a novel framework that integrates Chain-of-Draft (CoD) reasoning into multi-agent RL training. Instead of generating single responses, each agent produces multiple drafts per query, which are then evaluated by peer agents and a learned reward model to identify the most promising trajectory. These selected drafts are used to refine future reasoning strategies through actor-critic learning. DRAFT-RL enables explicit multi-path exploration, peer-guided reflection, and reward-aligned selection, resulting in more robust and interpretable LLM agent behavior. We evaluate our method on complex reasoning tasks including code synthesis, symbolic math, and knowledge-intensive QA, demonstrating that DRAFT-RL outperforms existing reflective and RL-based agents by significant margins in both accuracy and convergence speed.

DRAFT-RL: Multi-Agent Chain-of-Draft Reasoning for Reinforcement Learning-Enhanced LLMs

Repairing flawed domain models remains a critical challenge in AI planning, with few effective techniques available. We propose a novel approach for repairing totally ordered hierarchical task network (TO-HTN) models with missing actions, guided by a plan that must be valid for the repaired model. This problem has only one previously documented approach, which relies on complex re-encoding that's solved via TO-HTN planning. In contrast, our approach translates the repair task into a context-free grammar repair problem and leverages a large language model (LLM) to identify and insert relevant actions directly, simplifying the repair process. We evaluate our approach on established benchmarks and demonstrate substantially improved results over the prior approach, achieving nearly three times the number of instances solved, and nearly solving all instances of domains in which the previous approach solved zero. Importantly, we mask all natural language hints, such as action names, forcing the LLM to simulate reasoning and planning, and mitigating the risk of data leakage from its training corpus.

Automated Repair of Totally-Ordered Hierarchical Task Network Domains via Context-Free Grammars with Large Language Model Support

Open-Set Domain Generalization (OSDG) aims to generalize over unseen target domains containing open classes, and the core challenge lies in identifying unknown samples never encountered during training. Recently, CLIP has exhibited impressive performance in OSDG, while it still falls into the dilemma between structural risk of known classes and open space risk from unknown classes, and easily suffers from over-confidence, especially when distinguishing known-like unknown samples. To this end, we propose a Semantic-enhanced CLIP (SeeCLIP) framework that leverages fine-grained semantics to boost unknown detection, so as to accommodate both risks and enable precise discrimination among categories. In SeeCLIP, we propose a semantic-aware prompt enhancement module to extract fine-grained key semantic features, and establish a fine-grained vision-language alignment. Duplex contrastive learning is proposed for prompt learning, which jointly optimizes duplex losses such that the unknown prompt is similar to known prompts, yet exhibits key semantic differences. We also design a semantic-guided diffusion module to enable nuanced capture in generation. By injecting perturbed key semantics into a diffusion model as control conditions, it generates the closest unknowns or pseudo-open samples with high similarity yet low belongingness to known classes. We formulate a generalization bound for OSDG, and show that SeeCLIP can achieve a lower generalization risk. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets validate the superiority of SeeCLIP, it outperforms the SOTA methods by nearly 3% on accuracy and 5% on H-index, respectively.

The Finer the Better: Towards Granular-aware Open-set Domain Generalization

Object detection in High-Resolution Wide (HRW) shots, or gigapixel images, presents unique challenges due to extreme object sparsity and vast scale variations. State-of-the-art methods like SparseFormer have pioneered sparse processing by selectively focusing on important regions, yet they apply a uniform computational model to all selected regions, overlooking their intrinsic complexity differences. This leads to a suboptimal trade-off between performance and efficiency. In this paper, we introduce GigaMoE, a novel backbone architecture that pioneers adaptive computation for this domain by replacing the standard Feed-Forward Networks (FFNs) with a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) module. Our architecture first employs a shared expert to provide a robust feature baseline for all selected regions. Upon this foundation, our core innovation---a novel Sparsity-Guided Routing mechanism---insightfully repurposes importance scores from the sparse backbone to provide a "computational bonus,'' dynamically engaging a variable number of specialized experts based on content complexity. The entire system is trained efficiently via a loss-free load-balancing technique, eliminating the need for cumbersome auxiliary losses. Extensive experiments show that GigaMoE sets a new state-of-the-art on the PANDA benchmark, improving detection accuracy by 1.1\% over SparseFormer while simultaneously reducing the computational cost (FLOPs) by a remarkable 32.3\%.

GigaMoE: Sparsity-Guided Mixture of Experts for Efficient Gigapixel Object Detection

Many marketing applications, including credit card incentive programs, offer rewards to customers who exceed specific spending thresholds to encourage increased consumption. 
Quantifying the causal effect of these thresholds on customers is crucial for effective marketing strategy design. 
Although regression discontinuity design is a standard method for such causal inference tasks, its assumptions can be violated when customers, aware of the thresholds, strategically manipulate their spending to qualify for the rewards.
To address this issue, we propose a novel framework for estimating the causal effect under threshold manipulation.
The main idea is to model the observed spending distribution as a mixture of two distributions: one representing customers strategically affected by the threshold, and the other representing those unaffected. 
To fit the mixture model, we adopt a two-step Bayesian approach consisting of modeling non-bunching customers and fitting a mixture model to a sample around the threshold. 
We show posterior contraction of the resulting posterior distribution of the causal effect under large samples. 
Furthermore, we extend this framework to a hierarchical Bayesian setting to estimate heterogeneous causal effects across customer subgroups, allowing for stable inference even with small subgroup sample sizes. 
We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed methods through simulation studies and illustrate their practical implications using a real-world marketing dataset.

Causal Inference Under Threshold Manipulation: Bayesian Mixture Modeling and Heterogeneous Treatment Effects

Intelligent perception among multiple agents enables them to extend their individual observation capabilities by sharing sensory information, thereby improving the completeness and accuracy of environmental understanding. However, real-world communication is often subject to non-negligible delays, which can degrade the effectiveness of perception. To mitigate this, delay alignment is commonly employed to synchronize delayed observations to a common timestamp. Yet, both alignment errors and inherent discrepancies between multi-view observations can lead to inconsistencies in the estimated position and orientation of shared targets. These inconsistencies can accumulate during feature fusion, ultimately reducing the accuracy and reliability of the perception results.To address this challenge, we propose IPDA, a delay-aware multi-agent intelligent perception method that performs joint calibration in both temporal and spatial domains. In the temporal dimension, we design a historical alignment attention mechanism to model dynamic delay correction across sequences, ensuring temporal coherence. In the spatial dimension, we introduce a discrepancy-quantized co-sensing network that captures and compensates for multi-view spatial deviations caused by viewpoint diversity and alignment inaccuracy. IPDA is evaluated on two large-scale intelligent perception benchmarks, DAIR-V2X and OPV2V. Experimental results demonstrate that our method effectively mitigates delay-induced inconsistencies and consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines under various delay conditions.

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